This is the first known galaxy to have three supermassive black holes

[brooklynite]

CNN

Supermassive black holes act as the engines powering the centers of galaxies, including our own Milky Way galaxy. But in a first, scientists have observed that one galaxy contains three supermassive black holes at its core and they're surprisingly close together.

The galaxy, NGC 6240, has an unusual shape, which previously led scientists to believe that it was created when two smaller galaxies collided and began to merge. NGC 6240 is relatively close to us by universal standards at 300 million light-years away, so astronomers have been able to study it in all wavelengths of light.

It was seen as a standard for galactic interaction and scientists thought that due to the merger, there were likely two black holes at its core.

But new observations revealed a third supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Each black hole has the mass of more than 90 million suns each.

The findings were published Thursday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The new observations of the galaxy were obtained by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.